I create site-specific installations and sculptures with buttons (various kinds of buttons including the Hanji paper buttons), threads, and pins. The combination of endurance and ephemerality is at the heart of my choice of using buttons as the primary medium. Buttons are my metaphorical medium representing the existence of human beings. We never recognize the importance of a button before we notice its disappearance from our clothes. This basic perception begins my work. My practice is all about nurturing the notion of presence and absence, reality and illusion, life and mortality in contemporaneous life.

I hammer thousands of pins into walls and wooden or acrylic panels with my bare hands. The process of creating these large installations is time-consuming, repetitive, and labor-intensive. Thus, the production process is a meditation for me to visualize a cosmological amount of time, and de-installation process is to end the cycle of life and to start a new cycle.

Through my work, I convey my enduring examination of the chasm between visibility and invisibility. The chasm where all visible things in the world conceal their non-visible aspects.

More info: ranhwang.com

Two Love Tree, 2009

Working on the East Wind_K(LT) at the studio in 2015

Buddha Falling in Love, 2013

Sweet in Yean, 2010

Eternal Muse, 2016

Whimsical Dream S-2W, 2011

Detail of Whimsical Dream S-2W, 2011

The Beginning of The Bright, 2015

Detail of The Beginning of The Bright

East Wind, 2015

First Wind-CL, 2013/2015

Becoming Again, 2014

Becoming Again, 2014

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